Making the Unbearable Slightly Better: Holiday Traveling Tactics

We all know how excruciating air travel can be: we all have tales of endless delays, horrid seatmates, unhelpful help, expensive carb-laden airport food and general misery (watching a $70 jar of tiny face cream deemed a liquid being tossed into the trash certainly qualifies!), so why belabor them here?

While airports and flights are more to be endured than enjoyed these days, there are a few tactics that I've founded in my million plus miles that might help this holiday season.

Tip #1: Drown it Out
Top of my list is avoiding actual contact and conversation with everyone possible. My must-have? Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones. I prefer the over the ear version, Bernard prefers the on the ear version. Just believe us: they really work. And don't cheap out and buy imitations, these are the ones that you need. Expensive, but worth every penny.

Tip #2: A Well-Stocked IPod
I always carefully plan my traveling playlists. My preference on long flights are books and podcasts rather than music. Somehow it makes those 8 hour flights fly by. Audible's got the widest selection of book downloads, and manybooks.net has the widest variety of FREE downloads (mostly classics that are in the public domain). My favorite podcasts to travel with? This American Life, without question.

Tip #3: Real-Time Flight Status
Lifehacker offers several great ways to figure out what's going on with your flight. My favorite are text alerts: test either Google (466453) or 4INFO (44636) with the airline and flight number to get the status texted back to you immediately.

Making it All Work: A Sneak Peek at David Allen's New Book

BNET just published a preview of David Allen's new book, "Making it All Work," which will be released at the end of this year. Allen, the "Getting Things Done" guru, is a personal favorite of mine, and his GTD principles help keep me organized and on track (my incredibly messy desk nonwithstanding). His earlier books, "Getting Things Done" and "Ready for Anything," are must reads for anyone interested in figuring out how to deal with all of the "stuff" in our work life and personal life. Check out the excerpts here, and let me know what you think.

Stuff I'm Loving Right Now

Online: my new favorite source of news, gossip and information is The Daily Beast, who's motto is "Read This, Skip That." Uber-Editor Tina Brown's foray into the online world, after stints at Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and the ill-fated Talk magazine, seems to have a winner here. It's a singular combination of snarky gossip and snippets, thoughtful yet short(!) articles, lots of financial and political commentary. Just my cup 'o tea and I can breeze through it in a couple of minutes. Can't decide though, how I feel about Alexandra Penney's blog, "The Bag Lady Series." Penney, a former magazine editor-turned-artist and one of the many victims of Bernie Madoff, is equal parts annoying and sympathy-provoking. She lives in NYC, for god's sake, but hadn't ever taken a bus or cab? I'm quite adverse to public transportation in Chicago, but you really do need to use the subway in NYC. Read a couple of her posts and let me know what you think. I think that my sympathy for her is wearing thin.

End of the Year Reviews...

It's a little early for end of lists, however my two favorite ones are out now. The Time Magazine List Issue, and the New York Times Magazine Eight Annual Year in Ideas Issue. What I love about these issues is everything I missed...

From Time, which offers its top ten on many topics: Apparently I missed some of the top buzzwords of the year: "nuke the fridge," and "topless meetings.".

Time on Food Trends: how did I miss the Clover? The best coffee machine in the world? Guess so, since Starbucks purchased the company. Anyone know of a Clover in Chicago? Next, the Mex-Italian trend? Haven't found it anywhere in Chicago yet, but it can't be far away.

Their top ten gadgets I can't wait to try? The Optoma Pico PK-101: a projector for IPods and IPhones. Tiny, powerful, totally cool. Several boys in our family are getting the Flip MinoHD(an incredibly small, hi def camcorder that's idiot proof and comes with its own editing software (please don't tell the boys!). I'm also hoping for a Kindle for myself under the tree.

From the New York Times Year in Ideas: Ideas that I hadn't heard of: Automated Anesthesia, Gallons Per Mile (not miles per gallon), and moonvertising.

My Favorite Bookmarked Websites

Ok, I could admit that it's CNN, WSJ and New York Times, and I do check in with news outlets on a regular basis. But it's easy to get news anywhere, anyway these days. But I'm judicious in what I choose to bookmark these days. So what bookmarked sites do I visit the most? Herewith, in no particular order:

Trademark Search: Being in the business of communication, it's helpful to check if someone else has had your novel idea before you. We often work on naming assignments, or branding assignments. Imagine how depressing it is to present weeks worth of work, only to be told, "that name is taken." While this site cannot take the place of a trademark lawyer, and just because a name looks taken, doesn't always mean it is, it's a great first step to see if there's trouble on the horizon. It's a government site that works! (Corollary site for domain names: I usually check out Go Daddy or Network Solutions.)


Jen Lancaster's site, Jennsylvania, is an acquired taste, but one I rarely miss. Author of "Bitter is the New Black" and "Bright Lights, Big Ass", Jen is alternately annoying, entertaining, bitchy, and sweet. Her posts are light and fluffy, take moments to read, and usually make me laugh out loud. For anyone who gets annoyed with city life, married life, work life or dieting in general, I highly recommend Jen. She's constantly pissed off, and hilarious.

Visual Thesaurus:While you can use website for free for a couple of tries, it's so worth the $20 bucks per year for a complete registration to get all the bells and whistles. It's an interactive dictionary and thesaurus, that creates word maps, rather than sterile listings. It's intuitive, inventive and helps me out of word pinches on a regular basis.

Shelfari : A booklover's dream. You post the books you've read, want to read and are reading now. You can get feedback from other readers, check out what books others who like books you like like (did that make any sense), and you can post your shelf on a blog or website.

Alltop: the best search engine out there if you want information, rather than a sales pitch. It aggregates top posts on almost any subject, which allows you to find the information you're looking for without having to scroll through pages of sales listing on google. Try it, you'll never look back.

Page Six: I'm a displaced native New Yorker. And cannot get the New York Post anywhere in the Midwest in printed form. The online version of my favorite gossip column does not disappoint. Ever.

The Magazines I Won't Give Up: My Top Three

Are magazines a dying breed? Certainly the trade pubs are proclaiming their demise. Many are moving to online presence only. But to me, there's something about the tactile quality of holding a magazine in my hands. It's portable for one, I don't have to rely on my laptop's battery reserve, and I can rip out pages to keep. What blog can say that?

Friends, family and colleagues know me as a magazine fiend. I subscribe to about 40 (that's a conservative estimate), and I'm now finding it hard to get through all of them, so I'm slowly letting many subscriptions expire as they come due.

One: The mag is spend the most time with is Vanity Fair. It's perfect plane ride reading material, when I need to block out everything around me, including the snoring man on my left and the salami sandwich eating teen on my right (that was a ORD to LAX ordeal. Thanks American Airlines: knew that Platinum status would come in handy.) Always a compelling mix of politics, current events, investigative reporting and gossip. A first rate editorial staff.

Two: The Week. Not easy to find on newsstands: worth the subscription. A roundup of international opinion on everything. Kind of a Readers' Digest for the uber-literate. A mix of politics, current events, culture, real estate, cooking, and everything under the sun. Takes about one hour to read from cover to cover and worth it.

Three: The New Yorker. Yes, I'm a native New Yorker and proud of it, but I'd subscribe anyway. The New Yorker is not afraid of depth and length. Some of the best books every year have excerpts published here first, from David Sedaris, Malcolm Gladwell, Calvin Trillin, and so many more. The only magazine left that still only publishes illustration on its covers.

The Best Explanation of the Financial Mess to Date

Michael Lewis' seminal book on the excess of the finance industry in the 80s, "Liar's Poker," seems positively quaint today. A CEO bringing home 3.1 million? Were we really upset by that?

In his recent article in Conde Nast Portfolio, The End, Lewis performs a masterful deconstruction of the sub-prime mess, but his real insight is that transformation of private investment banks to public corporations created a dangerous concoction of infallability, idiocy and arrogance. Transferring financial consequence from partnerships to shareholders, Wall Street freed itself from the rigor of common sense that somehow the rest of us seem to know instinctively: don't spend more than you have, don't buy a financial product you can't understand, don't buy it from someone who doesn't understand it either.

Another recent article in the New York Times dissects the lack of oversight from top down at CitiGroup. It's as informative as it is scary. Click here to read.

Inaugural Posting

This is my inaugural blog entry. Useful Stuff 101 will provide ideas from all sources, on anything and everything I find interesting to illuminate our minds, and ideas to make our lives more manageable. Sometimes it may be book or article suggestions, websites, blogs and books I like, productivity suggestions, or whatever else comes to mind.

I loved my first IPhone. I love my new IPhone 3G even more. Here forthwith, are my favorite apps and time savers from the ITunes app store.

OpenTable: My favorite online restaurant reservation site, Open Table, has just released an iphone/itouch app. Make reservations with a couple of quick clicks. go to Itunes apps to download for free. Doesn't have a search feature, but the GSP will show you closest restaurants.

Shazam: A nifty little app that can identify any music that you are listening to. No more "I know that group, but who is it?"

Easy Writer: Allows you to turn iPhone sideways to type emails. Very useful for those of us with chubby fingers.